The bots, designed to replace risky open-heart surgery and ineffective IV drug therapy to treat life-threatening heart infections, could also be used to treat other hard-to-reach diseases, including cancer, less invasively and more precisely.
“With just a little pinprick, you insert a microrobot and do a procedure without infection or blood loss. And you don’t need to have a surgeon operating it to get the drugs robustly, safely and efficiently to the right place,” said senior author Axel Krieger, a medical roboticist known for creating robots that perform surgery without human help.